feminism

Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the US military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, aren't likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds. No female bus riders in India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding packs of women terrorizing men in Cairo's Tahrir Square, and there's no maternal equivalent to the 11 percent of rapes that are by fathers or stepfathers.

[She] discovered what feminism intended to be about, or at least a piece of what it promised to the generations who followed blindly in its wake. The freedom to live one's life apart from any prescribed pathway. The ability to love men and children and jobs but not lose one's self to them. The opportunity to embrace choices rather than just have them.

Power is the ability not to have to please

How can it be men would put up with such an arrangement?''Why do some people demand it of women but not of men? It is just another way of doing things. As my father would have said, folk will have their customs according to their nature and their surroundings.

Pregnancy and childbirth are not only physical and medical experiences, after all. They are also social experiences that, in modern America, just as when abortion was criminalized in the 1870s, serve to restrict women's ability to participate in society on equal footing with men.

After a while, when she has forgotten him a little, when she realizes that her life and her are more to her than any man, she will tell me about it.

Every woman who chooses--joyfully, thoughtfully, calmly, of her own free will and desire--not to have a child does womankind a massive favor in the long term. We need more women who are allowed to prove their worth as people, rather than being assessed merely for their potential to create new people. After all, half of those new people we go on to create are also women--presumably themselves to be judged, in their futures, for not making new people. And so it will go on, and on...While motherhood is an incredible vocation, it has no more inherent worth than a childless woman simply being who she is, to the utmost of her capabilities. To think otherwise betrays a belief that being a thinking, creative, productive, and fulfilled woman is, somehow, not enough. That no action will ever be the equal of giving birth.

As a black woman interested in feminist movement, I am often asked whether being black is more important than being a woman; whether feminist struggle to end sexist oppression is more important than the struggle to racism or vice versa. All such questions are rooted in competitive either/or thinking, the belief that the self is formed in opposition to an other...Most people are socialized to think in terms of opposition rather than compatibility. Rather than seeing anti-racist work as totally compatible with working to end sexist oppression, they often see them as two movements competing for first place.

or else I would have sung a songin response to what the male sex sings.For our lengthy past has much to sayabout men's lives as well as ours

I wore you on me at all timesLike I now carry my pen.Unlike your own opinion myBelongings must have a function.You bled through the ink of my lines andTo be my subject nursed your thirst.Was it my fault, or your own, that you forgot__ do not deal in tender verse.

Guys, you don't have to act "manly" to be considered a man; you are a man, so just be yourself. Don't let society make you believe you have to prove your masculinity to anyone because you don't. You are you and you are worthy, full stop.

now I'm blinking in a new gloamingand all I see as I'm stretched low down hereis a world of women flat on their frozenfaces. we are the ground itself, corporealcarpet of cells, softness calloused hardbeneath the pebbled soles of the fathersand husbands and brothers and priestsand it's a horror if you could see it,a world of women ruinedby man's fear.

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.The cyborg is our onthology; it gives us our politics. the cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation.

The dawn of space travel is the dawn of woman.

If a man took a lover it would be accounted commonplace. Why shouldn't you? Your virtue lies in your mind, not in what lies between your legs.

She catches sight of herself in her video-feed, her face contorted with fury. Wiping spittle from the sides of her mouth, she reaches behind her to grab her lip gloss and reapplies it. __nd don__ even start thinking about what a bitch I am,_ she says. Her eyes are steady, the heat receding from her skin. __his is not my fault. I__ just doing what we have been trained to do. This is who we are, freida. This is who we were designed to be.

For thousands of years, servants and slaves--or in lesser households, wives and daughters--were stuck with the same pestles and sieves, with few innovations. This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.

Reproductive freedom is not just the ability not to have a child through birth control. It's the ability to have one if and when you want.